Sunday, 6 October 2013

Starting a business after the age of 50 is obviously a lot like starting a business at any age. All companies pretty much have the same rules for achieving success -- find a new idea; treat customers well; deliver value; outpace the competition.

Still, there are some subtle nuances about starting any business a little later in life. Sure, you may be approaching retirement, with a lot more free time and a nice nest egg to tap, but bouncing back from a failed business at 25 can also be a lot easier than when you're 65.

Are you over 50 and thinking about branching out on your own as an entrepreneur? Here are five things you need to know.

1. Don't see your age as a deterrent.

It can be easy to think about starting a business the way people over 50 used to think about going back to college to get that degree they always wanted. As long as you don't want to retire in a couple years, starting a company later in life shouldn't be a big deal. If you want a little historical inspiration, look at Ray Kroc, who was 52 when he went into business with Richard James "Dick" McDonald and Maurice James "Mac" McDonald and started the McDonald's empire. Harland Sanders, founder of KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken) started franchising his business when he was 65. And Momofuku Ando, the inventor of ramen noodles, started his company selling precooked instant noodles at age 48.

2. Think long and hard about what this venture is going to cost.

This is obvious advice, but it needs to be said: Don't invest more than you can afford to lose.

"Try to use other people's money," advises Gene Zaino, CEO of MBO Partners, a website that offers administrative services to independent consultants and small firms. "You're at a point in your life where you need to be protective of what you have, and as much as possible, avoid tapping into your 401(k) or retirement, or even your home line of credit."

But it's a delicate dance. The wonderful and terrible thing for many boomer entrepreneurs is that at this stage, you may well be sitting on a large nest egg. That's wonderful because those funds could be invested into a business that generates new income for you. But that's also terrible because you may be tempted to sink all that money you've saved into starting a business.

Saturday, 24 August 2013

By Siobhan Gorman

WASHINGTON—National Security Agency officers on several occasions have channeled their agency’s enormous eavesdropping power to spy on love interests, U.S. officials said.

The practice isn’t frequent — one official estimated a handful of cases in the last decade — but it’s common enough to garner its own spycraft label: LOVEINT.

Spy agencies often refer to their various types of intelligence collection with the suffix of “INT,” such as “SIGINT” for collecting signals intelligence, or communications; and “HUMINT” for human intelligence, or spying.

In the wake of revelations last week that NSA had violated privacy rules on nearly 3,000 occasions in a one-year period, NSA Chief Compliance Officer John DeLongemphasized in a conference call with reporters last week that those errors were unintentional. He did say that there have been “a couple” of willful violations in the past decade. He said he didn’t have the exact figures at the moment.

NSA said in a statement Friday that there have been “very rare” instances of willful violations of any kind in the past decade, and none have violated key surveillance laws. “NSA has zero tolerance for willful violations of the agency’s authorities” and responds “as appropriate.”

The LOVEINT violations involved overseas communications, officials said, such as spying on a partner or spouse. In each instance, the employee was punished either with an administrative action or termination.

Most of the incidents, officials said, were self-reported. Such admissions can arise, for example, when an employee takes a polygraph tests as part of a renewal of a security clearance.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.), who chairs the Senate intelligence committee, said the NSA told her committee about a set of “isolated cases” that have occurred about once a year for the last 10 years, where NSA personnel have violated NSA procedures.

She said “in most instances” the violations didn’t involve an American’s personal information. She added that she’s seen no evidence that any of the violations involved the use of NSA’s domestic surveillance infrastructure, which is governed by a law known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

“Clearly, any case of noncompliance is unacceptable, but these small numbers of cases do not change my view that NSA takes significant care to prevent any abuses and that there is a substantial oversight system in place,” she said. “When errors are identified, they are reported and corrected.”

Monday, 1 July 2013

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Wednesday, 29 May 2013

With more than 2 billion people surfing the internet, and more than $1.25 trillion rung up in on-line sales annually, your corporate website can be one of your most valuable assets. But how do you harness its true power to increase sales, move up in search and keep customers coming back?

I could fill a library (or 1000 hard drives) with recommendations on how to do this. Internet marketing is an extremely complex proposition. But whether you manage your own site, or enlist an on-line specialist for the task, here are the basic principles you should follow to make some pretty substantial gains.

1. Closely Measure and Monitor Current User Behavior

The first step to improving your website's performance is to closely measure and monitor how it performs in the first place. Too many small businesses create and market a website without paying close attention - on a regular basis -- to visitor metrics. Tracking user behavior is critical because then you can identify what you need to improve, and adjust accordingly.

• What kind of traffic are you getting? Where is it coming from?
• What is your conversion rate? How many visitors go no further than your home page?
• How much time are they spending on your site and where do they go after they leave?

If you owned a retail business, you would know exactly what you have on the shelf and how many people came in and what they bought. You would also know how many left empty handed.

When you monitor the behavior of your visitors to your website, you provide yourself with a huge opportunity to improve your business. For example, if 70% of those visiting never get past the home page, then you need to make some serious improvements to your homepage. If you lose people while they are buying a product, better check on the functionality of your check-out page.

The good news is this information is readily available and free with services like Google Analytics. With this tool, you can drill down into every page of your website, study individual page performance - and make improvements based on what you discover.

Set aside at least two times a month to "check under the hood" and make some repairs and enhancements.

Sunday, 28 April 2013

Children are known for how much they love to play make believe, and StoryKid, an app introduced today during the Disrupt Hackathon in New York, takes this and gives it a new twist by offering a series of pictures as visual cues for a child to tell a story based around them. StoryKid is aimed at children aged 2 to 5 who are already talking but may either be too young or just starting to write. Created by two comparative literature PhDs from Columbia University, the idea is that this will, in turn, help bring children into the world of story telling and literature. And as co-founder Tianjiao Yu tells me, it can also be used by parents when they’ve run out of inspiration for their own made-up bedtime stories.

Yu, left, says that she learned to code to create the app, while her co-founder Lu Xiong, right, boned up on design and user experience to work on the visual elements. Their motivation to do this was to take what they’ve been learning out of the ivory towers of higher learning.

“Both of us are interested in the humanities and making them accessible to everyone,” Yu says. “We find creating an app is the perfect way to do this.” StoryKid is one of three ideas that the pair have to make literature more accessible to people. The other two, however, are more about discovery of existing literature rather than creating new things. The two are on the lookout now for a third coder who can help with creating these.

Startups still have a hard time finding the right applicants for their jobs. During our Disrupt NY 2013 hackathon, Codecademy engineer Bob Ren wrote a little web app that takes the Common Application for college admission as its inspiration. Just like high school students can use the Common Application to apply to multiple colleges simultaneously, Startup Common Application will take your application and then submit it to multiple startups.

Large companies typically have a huge pipeline with job prospects, but startups “naturally suffer from not having the big pipelines that big companies have,” Ren told me – and for a small startup, it’s even harder to find the right applicants.

Currently, startups either rely on email, Job Score or Resumator, but the system is still very inefficient, especially for the applicants. You often spend hours getting your applications ready and submitted, but a system like Startup Common Application could just automate all of this for you (and you don’t even have to pretend that you really personalized the system).

Common Startup Application runs on top of Heroku and Ren is working on a number of scripts that will take his users’ data and then auto-submit it to more startups. In the spirit of the Hackathon, Ren coded until 6 a.m. and then slept an hour before getting ready for his demo this afternoon.

Obviously, this is still a hack, so Ren will surely have to work on the design a bit more, but he’s definitely tackling an interesting problem. Given that he can automate much of it, what he really needs right now, of course, is support for as many startups as possible, but there are some pretty obvious ways he could monetize this service if he decides to continue working on it.

Considering the gold rush around peer-to-peer currency Bitcoin, it’s not surprising that one of the hackers at the Disrupt NY hackathon created an application around the currency. Pay With Bits was to be a Square for Bitcoin. The startup essentially allows Bitcoins to be transfered between parties via their mobile phones.

The original idea came from Byrnes, a Developer at COG1 Interactive in San Francisco. Smith sold his startup Focal Labs, which launched at TechCrunch50, to RadiumOne in 2011. The rest of the team (Prateek, Cody, Jon, and Ben) developed FreshTag.me in June of last year.

Smith explains that the team wanted to find a way to make Bitcoin accesible to the masses. You simply enter your Bitcoin account information on Pay With Bits, and you can send money via text message to any other party who also has entered their info on Pay With Bits. Pay With bits serves as a node on Bitcoin network, Smith adds.

Smith says that using Pay With Bits, Bitcoins can be transferred internationally in a secure way within minutes. Because there are no interchange charges from a bank or credit card, Pay With Bits only incurs fees that are a fraction of a percent. In the future, Smith wants to add NFC capabilities as well.

Pay With Bits adds to the growing number of startups in the Bitcoin world, including BitPay andBitinstant.

Friday, 12 April 2013

In keeping with its barely legal mystique, the future success of virtual currency bitcoin may lie in porn.

Bitcoin, an electronic coin that exists only on computer servers and is not backed by any national government, has skyrocketed in the past few weeks, seeing an exponential rise in both price and popularity. But the currency has a serious problem: Very few businesses actually allow consumers to pay using bitcoins, making them about as valuable as Monopoly money for everyday use.

Enter pornography.

“Generally speaking, porn is an early adopter of anything related to new technology. If you look back, they were the first to adopt many of the new video formats,” said Fred Ehrsam, a former Goldman Sachs currency trader who left a desk in New York to create Coinbase, a company that processes bitcoin payments for merchants.

“A weird mix, frankly, of Internet nerds and privacy advocates were the early adopters,” Ehrsam described them.

A sizable number of those early adopters happen to run businesses that provide online hosting or website design services, two products that pornography businesses, like others with major web presences, use in spades. If porn sites start to see they can pay their suppliers in bitcoins, they will likely be willing to accept the currency themselves.

That "new experience" doesn’t stop at the phone’s screen. What Home seeks to deliver is not only a Facebook environment for our phones, but also a Facebook environment for our lives.

With Home, Facebook has crossed the line between something people check -- that they have control over, and deploy according to their wishes and needs -- to become something that’s always on, checking in with us, fighting for attention, waving people we know in our face. Rather than a tool we use to talk to others, the phone, thanks to Facebook, has become something that communicates to us. And it’s Facebook that gets to do the talking.

Home, which will be available for download on a handful of smartphones next week, is essentially a Facebook-ified version of Google’s Android operating system, modified by Facebook engineers to place the social network at its core. A flow of updates from the News Feed will be the first thing people see when they turn on their phones -- the newly named “cover feed,” a slideshow of friends’ photos and status updates, will take over the phone’s primary screen, though users can swipe past to access other applications. Home also touts “chat heads,” a feature that brings together texting and messaging, replaces names with Facebook photos and lets users message within any application. Ads will be on their way to the cover feed soon, Facebook conceded. And though the social network didn’t say as much, technology observers, such as Om Malik, have pointed out that Home will let Facebook scoop up even more personal information about everything from our locations to our calls.

Tuesday, 2 April 2013

Google has always been known for its great April Fools' Day pranks. In fact, it was Google who arguably started the pranking tradition in the tech industry (which in 2013 includes Twitter, Netflix, Hulu and others). All the way back in 2000, Google first pranked users by telling them they had created a new program that allowed users to search with their minds. Google has generally gotten good press for its efforts. But they hit a bump this year.

For one of this year's pranks, Google made a video saying that it was going to shut down YouTube. What was meant to be a lighthearted joke -- over 4 billion hours of video are watched each month, YouTube isn't going anywhere -- turned into a bit of a PR issue. Pretending to kill YouTube seemed to remind many, or at least many who have Twitter accounts, that Google is actually killing Google Reader. Last month, Google upset a whole lot of devoted users when it announced that it is planning to discontinue the RSS reader, the unspoken reason being to focus users on Google+. Just when that fire had died down, Google found a way to reignite it.

SEOUL, April 2 (Reuters) - North Korean nuclear weapons act as a deterrent to potential aggressors and as a foundation for its prosperity, the country's leader said in a speech delivered on Sunday and published in full by the country's KCNA news agency on Tuesday.

"Our nuclear strength is a reliable war deterrent and a guarantee to protect our sovereignty," Kim Jong-un said in a speech delivered to the central committee meeting of the ruling Workers Party of Korea.

The speech appeared to emphasize a shift to economic development and accused the United States of seeking to drag North Korea into an arms race in a bid to create obstacles to economic improvement. (Reporting by David Chance; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)

SEOUL, April 2 (Reuters) - North Korean nuclear weapons act as a deterrent to potential aggressors and as a foundation for its prosperity, the country's leader said in a speech delivered on Sunday and published in full by the country's KCNA news agency on Tuesday.

"Our nuclear strength is a reliable war deterrent and a guarantee to protect our sovereignty," Kim Jong-un said in a speech delivered to the central committee meeting of the ruling Workers Party of Korea.

The speech appeared to emphasize a shift to economic development and accused the United States of seeking to drag North Korea into an arms race in a bid to create obstacles to economic improvement. (Reporting by David Chance; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)